How Kamala Harris brought fun back to the polls, and the young back to Dems

She is the brat. She has redefined coconut in the zeitgeist. She can dance. The pop stars love her. She has her own online fan base. And the young are lapping it up.

As Van Jones, a CNN commentator put it, Kamala Harris has gone from cringe to cool. In the world of memes, her statements, often divorced from the context, and her laughter, often due to misogyny, evoked derision. Now, her one-liners are seen as funny and wise, and her full throttled laugh is seen as a sign of strong and expressive women who can be themselves.

And in that lies the story of not just the rapid and remarkable turnaround in Harris’s image, but a possible turnaround in the fortunes of the Democrats among the young.

The campaign recognises this potential. In a memo on Wednesday, the Harris campaign chair Jennifer O’Maley Dillon claimed that the presumptive Democratic nominee led Donald Trump among younger voters by 25 points and that a preliminary survey had shown the intent of college students to vote increased the highest in this election cycle after Harris entered the race. Remember, this was the demographic that propelled Joe Biden to a victory in 2020 and increasingly turned away from him, both due to his age and American support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Similarly, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Harris led Trump 44% to 42% in a national poll.

The turning point was singer Charli XCX’s endorsement on X, “kamala IS brat”. The post, referring to the singer’s last album released this summer, went viral, the aesthetics of the album cover formed the backdrop of Harris’s campaign handle, and American media outlets devoted prime time to understanding what it really meant.

As the singer, whose mother incidentally is of Gujarati descent, explained, “You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.”

And Harris owned it, and with it, she showed grace and a willingness to laugh at herself. KHive, the name for online fan following that dates back to her days in the Senate and her first presidential run in 2020, reappeared. And this fan base is “coconut pilled”.

That reference owes its origin to a speech Harris was making at White House last year. Explaining that everyone operated in a context, Harris had then said, “My mother would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The vice president erupted in her characteristic laugh, and the moment eventually became a meme. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, all those who wanted a change at the top of the ticket, and knew Harris was the likely candidate, began calling themselves “coconut pilled”.

Her campaign, earlier Biden’s, has mobilised TikTok just as efficiently.

Former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin, now the co-host of a talk show, said she was “blown away by Kamala Harris’ digital operation.”

“She’s had 24 hours to stand this up. She is all over TikTok. Trump is not ready for this,” she said.

To many young liberal voters, the 2024 election between an 81-year-old incumbent who they saw as disconnected from their reality and a part of the old establishment versus a 78-year-old former president whose politics of nativism they detested was depressing. Kamala Harris appears to have brought fun back to contest, and with it, the young back to politics and her party.

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